Free £5 voucher

Dear fellow Beckenham resident,

Anyone else reading this may need to adapt for context

I thought you would be interested to know that Tesco Elmers End is offering a free £5 (or more) voucher to any Beckenham resident. All you need to do to get this amazing offer is to make a complaint through their new, super-sexy, high-tech, AI chatbot service.

Just go to the Whatsapp link

... or other service via the contacts page and register your complaint. The AI chatbot will ask you all sorts of questions. Doesn't matter what the answers are, you will eventually get to a response that offers you a refund of your item plus a £5 voucher for your trouble.

At least that is my take on the level of 'Artificial Intelligence' deployed by Tesco. Try it for yourself. I am not sure if you even have to have bought a product from Tesco but to claim a refund when there was no purchase would of course be dishonest. So please don't do it. Anyone less than happy with a recent purchase, don't waste you time taking it back. Just complain to the AI and get a refund plus £5. No doubt this is cheaper than offering any proper level of customer service.

Is this just sour grapes on my part? Am I just a disgruntled customer? Judge for youself, if you have nothing better to do. Here is a verbatim transcript of a recent conversation I had with Tesco's AI superbot.

If Tesco Elmers End have any sense, they will ask their uberoffice headquarters to sack the IT crowd who installed this rubbish AI customer service drone and get something that works better. If you claim your £5 plus refund voucher, you will be doing them a public service.

And it of course is not just Tesco. And it happens even if I want to thank a retailer for good service. As I did after visiting a hotel in Broadstairs.

In this case it appears that the hotel owner is either going bust or has just decided to pack it all in and farm out its customer service to online booking systems. Good luck if you book this hotel and something goes wrong. There will be nobody to help you out.

AI the future

For the past few years I have been tracking the progress of so-called AI, researching and experimenting with various products and iterations of one branch of this technology dubbed: natural language processing or large language model, LLM. If you want to know more about the details, without getting bogged down in technical jargon and general IT gobbledegook, you might like to read this:

When the marketing term 'Artificial Intelligence' resurfaced (after a 20 year lull) with the launch of a crude chatbot product Chat-GPT in 2022, all sorts of commentators expressed horror, thought the end of the world was nigh. Even the British Prime Minister, then Rishi Sunak, held top-level diplomatic meetings with other European political leaders to discuss the dangers of AI and how to prevent it destroying the whole of humanity.

The reality is more mundane. Instead of listening to endless piped-music as we wait for someone to answer a customer service phoneline with a "For account enquiries, press 1, for plumbing enquiries press 2, for ...." we can now engage with AI chatbots. Their job, it seems, is to convince us the don't-give-a-shit companies we are calling really care about us and to resolve a standard issue by pointing us to a web site FAQ.

The future is about talking to chatbots so that we don't bother anyone else. Don't believe me? Think I am exaggerating? Well, try it for yourself. Think up a fake product you have just bought and then complain about it to the retailer's chatbot. See if you can get a refund and a £5 apology. Tesco Elmers End will do for a starter. If you think this is dishonest, do it anyway and give the voucher to charity.

You will be doing a favour to Tesco, or whatever other retailer you choose, by demonstrating how rubbish their IT and AI spend really is.